Fanny de Chaillé

On the 2nd December 1970, Michel Foucault gave his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, the first lesson for which a rewriting subsists, entitled L’Ordre du discours. Fanny de Chaillé recreates the event and puts together a discursive performance destined for university amphitheatres. The effect of this re-enacting of Foucault’s words is to set his thoughts in motion once again.

“But what is dangerous about people talking, and the fact that their various discourses proliferate indefinitely? What is the actual danger?” From his chair in the academy, Michel Foucault formulated a discourse on discourse and put forward a hypothesis: all societies set up structures which control, select, and redistribute the production of discourse. Right from the outset, the text, written to be spoken out loud, questions what it is, from the moment the philosopher bears witness to his fear of the act of discourse. Driven by the desire to stage this text that she has often read, and by that of a return to the realms of the university amphitheatre, Fanny de Chaillé immerses the actor Guillaume Baillart in the fertile dialectic between language and its utterance. By seeking out the initial orality, which is by its very nature imaginary and disordered, she transposes the rhythmic Foucualdian prose into a precise gestual and vocal partition. The body becomes a support for the spoken word, the spoken word for language, and language for the thought, jubilant as it is to be set in motion. In the amphitheatre, new spaces for saying and listening thus appear before us. If looking back at The Order of Discourse is a necessity, then it follows that its train of thought needs brought back to life, so that it continues to speak to us.

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Estimated running time : 1h